Bruno Bobak

Bruno Bobak, who has died aged 88, was the youngest of Canada’s 32 official
war artists in the Second World War and one of his country’s most recognised
painters.

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Tank Convoy, 1944 (detail)

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Bruno Bobak

6:49PM BST 04 Oct 2012

Bruno Bobak was born in Wawelowska, Poland, on December 27 1923. His family moved to Canada two years later and he began painting as a teenager, studying under Arthur Lismer in Toronto.

He enlisted in the Canadian Army aged 19 and, after training as a sapper, headed off to Britain in early 1944. “They said I was now an 'expert’ in demolition,” he recalled. Before the Normandy landings, however, he entered some of his works in a competition, winning first prize, and was called to join the war artists. He missed D-Day by a week, later reflecting that becoming a war artist may have saved his life because most of the men in his former company had been killed during their first day in Europe.

After the invasion, Bobak crossed over to France and travelled with the 4th Canadian Armoured Division through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, depicting the battlefield scenes during the push to Berlin. On one occasion he had to dive into a trench to avoid being strafed by a low-flying enemy plane. “Halfway down I could see I was falling onto a dead soldier, and when I hit him it went 'Splat,’ but I was too chicken to get out,” he recalled. Because he had trained as a sapper he was extremely cautious of dead animals — often a sign of the presence of landmines. One of his works, Dead Goats in Empel, was a powerful allegory of the emotional consequences of war.

Bobak’s work got darker and more brooding as the invasion progressed and as he learned about the terrible realities of conflict. In later life he said that, if he had had his time again, his images would have been much stronger: “There would be a great disapproval of the whole idea of military action to solve problems... When I joined I wasn’t even old enough to buy a beer, but the government seemed to think I was okay to be put in a position where I might get killed. It was like sending children,” he told an interviewer.

While back in London, painting in military studios, he was told he would have to share his workspace with Molly Lamb, another Canadian war artist: “I didn’t like that much,” he recalled, “so I built a barrier of crates down the middle and told her, 'I’m painting on my side, you paint on your side’. Well, eventually the wall came down.” They married in 1945.

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After the war the Bobaks lived briefly in Ottawa before moving to Vancouver in 1947. In 1960 they moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and Bruno became artist in residence at the University of New Brunswick. He also served for many years as director of the university’s Art Centre.

While his wife made a name for herself as a painter of crowded street scenes and floral compositions, Bruno Bobak became known for paintings and prints of landscapes and large figurative depictions of the human body that became increasingly expressionistic over time. His work is mainly found in Canada, though examples are held by galleries in Britain.